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Domain: zelow.no

Stories and comments across the archive that link to zelow.no.

Stories · 2

  1. Replace NAT Box with Commercial Broadband Router?

    Ask · Internet · · posted by Cliff · from the if-it-ain't-broke dept. · 118 comments
    hjf asks: "Three years ago, when I got DSL, I set up a 486 box, with 8 megs and a floppy drive to run FloppyFW. It has been through a couple hardware upgrades: 16Mb RAM for running the 2.4 kernel and a 100MBit PCI NIC for the internal network. It has a little UPS which lasts for over 60 minutes. The only downtime it has is when there's a thunderstorm and I unplug it. Besides that, it has been running flawlessly since I set it up. Lately I have been kind of seduced with this product from 3Com, and other similar to it. I know it says it can handle 253 simultaneous users and all that. My home network has 4 users, but most of us run eMule and other P2P, and as many of you know, those P2P programs can beat the crap out of your router." "For example, the default NAT table of my box wasn't enough (syslog reported TABLE FULL - DROPPING PACKET), so I made it 32768 entries and that message doesn't appear anymore. Now, what I'd like to know is, how big is that router's (or any other which does that kind of job) NAT table? Will it handle that many concurrent connections? I know I'll lose most of Linux's flexibility but I think I can live with that, but I'd surely win lots of room in the closet. So Slashdot, what's your opinion about all this?"

  2. Linux Source Distribution for Firewalls?

    Ask · Security · · posted by Cliff · from the where-"do-it-yourself"-is-too-easy dept. · 83 comments
    Peter Miller asks: "I want to build a new firewall. I want fine control over the exact contents of the disk. So I went looking at Linux source distributions. Every one I looked at (Gentoo, Lunar, etc) put the development environment on the final disk image. I don't think this is good for a firewall. Even Linux From Scratch does this, it isn't automated, and the nALFS UI is incomprehensible. I'd rather not have the package database in the final image, either. Micro-distros like FloppyFW doesn't publish their root image build script, and that's the route I'd like to follow. What do you security zealots out there use to build your firewalls from scratch?"